Non-invasive chimeric HaloTag labeling to study clustering and diffusion of membrane proteins

As live imaging plays an increasingly critical role in cell biology research, the desire to label and track individual protein molecules in vivo has been growing. To address this, in this protocol we describe steps for sparse labeling using two different HaloTag ligand dyes in C. elegans. This labeling approach is simple, is non-invasive, and preserves the view of the bulk protein population. We further describe how to carry out single-particle tracking experiments and extract information about particle diffusion behavior. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Chang and Dickinson (2022).¹.